Abstract
The paper focuses on a specific type of referring legal provisions, in which the referring phrase contains a component that indicates the position of a certain fragment of the same text of a normative act by determining the position of that fragment in relation to the fragment in which the given referring phrase is located. Despite the fact that these referrals, called deictic, may be perceived as uncomplicated in structure and as functioning correctly in legal texts, many theoretical as well as practical problems arise during their drafting and legal interpretation. The article attempts to reveal, organize and name these problems basing on the conceptual grid formulated by Studnicki, Łachwa, Fall and Stabrawa as a universal, although not widely known outside Polish jurisprudence, tool for analysing and solving referring provisions as elements of various legal systems, especially continental ones. Texts of selected Polish Codes have been chosen as an illustrative material of deictic referrals which have been incorrectly formulated as leaving space for interpretative doubts in terms of place of indication (demonstratum) and place of reference (referent), which also causes a potential problem of the deferred ostension phenomenon noticed by Quine. The author argues that proper drafting of referring legal provisions with deictic indication requires that the legislator should have extensive pragmalinguistic knowledge and is an essential part of law-making oriented towards achieving comprehensibility of texts of normative acts, especially as important as Codes.
Highlights
Drafting of texts of normative acts is nowadays perceived as an activity ensuring intelligibility, precision and other attributes of those texts, which are valuable to the “human” interpreter, and as an activity, which is important from the1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)M
Without being deeply involved in the issues of philosophy of language, for the purposes of these reflections it can be assumed that deixis will not be distinguished from anaphora,[6] since a firm distinction between anaphorical expressions, which are components of referring phrases in texts of normative acts, and deictic expressions with the same function would require strong assumptions about referents presupposed by the legislator
The persistence of Polish Codes, understood as their long validity since the initial promulgation, is a hypothetical announcement of the multitude of types of deictic referrals, and this is because of the ways in which legislative drafters have been editing the referring phrases that have changed over the years
Summary
Drafting of texts of normative acts is nowadays perceived as an activity ensuring intelligibility, precision and other attributes of those texts, which are valuable to the “human” interpreter, and as an activity, which is important from the. Without being deeply involved in the issues of philosophy of language, for the purposes of these reflections it can be assumed that deixis will not be distinguished from anaphora,[6] since a firm distinction between anaphorical expressions, which are components of referring phrases in texts of normative acts, and deictic expressions with the same function would require strong assumptions about referents presupposed by the legislator (as a speaker using these expressions) Each such assumption causes additional complications of editorial and interpretative operations carried out on utterances contained in texts of normative acts, and as a result lowers comprehensibility of the latter. Part 7 of this study has been devoted to an attempt to capture and organize them
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